


Cumae

by yakalskovich



Category: A Struggle For Rome
Genre: Blood and Gore, Gen, so much blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 02:46:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9858542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yakalskovich/pseuds/yakalskovich
Summary: How 299 died, and why one didn't.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A vignettte of Teja spilling blood, and growing weary of it.

_The day after, King Teja arrived at Cumae. Totila had, on his earnest advice, decided at this last all-decisive retreat from Rome to take hostages for the faithfulness of the city, against his usual custom: nobody knew where they had been brought.On the evening of his arrival, King Teja ordered the garden of the castellum of Cumae, which had been walled shut, to be opened: here, behind tower-high walls, the hostages from Rome had been hidden: patricians, senators - among them Maximus, Cyprianus, Opilio, Rusticus, Fidelius: the most respected men from the senate - three hundred all in all, and they were all members of Cethegus' old confederation of the catacombs, against the Gothic rule._

_Teja had the Goths which had escaped from Rome tell them how, in one night, the Romans had suddenly risen up, incited by messagers of Narses, and murdered all Goths they could find, even women and children; the rest, they had driven behind the moles Hadriani. So terrible was the king's gaze that he rested on the trembling hostages during those reports that two of them did not even wait for the end, but immediately dashed in their own skulls against the rocky walls. After the survivors had sworn to the truth of their reports, the king silently turned away and left the garden. An hour later, the heads of the three hundred hostages stared, horrifyingly, from the battlements.-_

Never would he ask of his men what they would not do willingly if left to their own devices; that was Teja's simple secret when leading them to do the impossible, infeasible, inhumanly outrageous. These men who lost their friends and comrades, their wives and children, to the insurgent citizens of Rome whose good faith these senators and patricians had been meant to guarantee: they would consummate the judgement from a deep need for revenge, not out of duty. It would give them satisfaction, closure before the next battle they would fight -- their last.

Thus Teja had known when he turned from the garden to speak to Wachis and old Hildebrand about the other thing he meant to do this night, making arrangements -- fish and ladders, bread and buckets, wine and strong chests.

But then, driven not by distrust or bloodthirst -- even though he had known much of both in his life -- Teja returned to the garden, to see the grisly work done, to see that the desperate survivors of Rome's Gothic garrison would dispatch the last survivors of Rome's senatorial caste without hesitation, and with no undue cruelty.

It was not execution, a long line of the subdued and weeping condemned going to the block; no, it was slaughter, personal revenge for each of the armed Goths that went about the garden, stabbing, cleaving, beheading unarmed Romans, some proudly upright beside the statues, some cowering, begging for mercy, behind the bushes -- but the avenging barbarians got them all. None had eyes for Teja as he stepped among them, and nothing but a bright red arc of blood that sprang from a swung sword into his face, unintentionally, greeted him as he entered -- the moans and prayers, screams and curses did not heed the presence of a king.

"Throw the heads up here; we'll show them what they've done!" a lad, one of the youngest survivors, called from the battlement; and a grizzled warrior of fifty threw the head that had just rolled under his feet up to the all, where it was caught by yet another. There were spikes there already, hooks for quivers, and brackets for torches; up on those, head after head went.

Teja, walking among the dead, the dying, and their executioners, bent to the bloody task and lent a hand, silently, unnoticed. There, an old man in a toga -- a toga still, indeed! -- lay twitching on the grass; a swing of the battle axe ended it, and then Teja bent, picked up the head by its short-cropped iron-grey hair, and threw it up to the battlement, where the lad caught it with a whoop that was not, entirely, sane.

But it was not sanity that was asked here, this evening. The sun that sank into the sea, well visible from the hill on which Cumae lay, the last tip, indeed, of the northern arm that spanned the bay of Naples, was as bloody as the grass, the well-kept bushes of the castle garden, were turning. Once, Teja slipped on a man's spilled entrails and stood again to bend slit the still-moaning Roman's throat, very quickly, before the axe once more turned around, lightly, swung down, and hit. And another head carelessly flew up to the wall.

_The glowing people of the Goths has turned into a pack of hungry wolves. -- That is why they needed a wolf for their leader._

Behind a bush, unheeded, a bearded soldier was despoiling a pale whimpering youth, hardly older than fifteen and just barely counted among the men of his class, to be brought here and die with them. A very rough prod from the haft of the battle-axe pushed the Goth away. Looking up, angrily, at whoever had disturbed him, the man took at least three heartbeats to recognise the dark figure reflected in his eyes: hair matted with other men's blood, face spattered in red, hand and arms smeared as was the handle of the battle-axe by which the soldier finally knew his king.

"I know," Teja hissed in his face, "you sister, your mother, your wife. Your daughter, your little brother, your son! But we do not do that, here!" He straightened, swung his battle axe, and at once, the youth's life-blood spilled powerfully from the great blood vessel in the neck to stain hair and cloak of his assaulter, rolled off and dazed beside the corpse. The head flew up to the battlement.

_You called me the spirit of divine wrath, I am not that -- I am merely the spirit of your own desperation!_

The sun was sinking fast, and there were men, rough men, with carts, that collected the corpses and boasted how their wives would get the bloodstains out of the fine cloth those dead, faceless Romans wore. Let them enjoy it, if that was what the wanted, for a last month or two! They did not recognise their king among the butchers of helpless men, and bandied greed that they would not, otherwise, have show. Fine shoes to be bartered! A silken shirt -- the rip caused by a sword could be mended, could it not?

In a corner, beside a stone bench, a young Goth in helmet and armour was vomiting his heart out; unarmed, beside him, one that he had meant to slay, equally young, was offering shy help. They had glutted on revenge until they spat it forth again, like the Romans of old at one of their infamous feasts -- it was enough. The head of the axe rested against the gravel of the path as Teja offered his hand first to one, then to the other, and led them, amazed, from the blood-soaked garden. Nobody would count the heads on the battlements and find them merely two hundred and ninety-nine.

_I have wallowed in grief and blood; I have taken off hope like a bloody rag, I sprang into the breach with cruel laughter. I have sown horror around me, even though my heart constricted in horror of myself; I did not even enjoy all that blood, but I slaughtered and slaughtered and slaughtered and knew, while I did so: it is for naught!_

Slipping from the Garden quietly, to seek the baths and to cleanse himself so men would know him, again, for the second great task of the night, Teja found himself pulled aside by Wachis, with a wide-eyed but silent Adalgoth behind him. "We have your bath, my lord," the shield-bearer said, "and all set out to clean your armour!"

"And fresh clothes, and a Liuta will clean and dry your cloak before tomorrow," Adalgoth added, quietly. The rest of the Teja's clothes were not worth saving. He looked into Teja's eyes. "It was necessary, I know."

Teja nodded. These two were always watching over him, made sure he got some sleep at least, found meals for him, cleaned his blood-encrusted weapons and armour, and spoke to him as one would speak to another man, not a frightening beast cloaked in the mythical aura of leadership.

_"But not just this fearsome judgement brought me to Cumae," Teja said to Adalgoth. "There is a more sacred secret to be reveiled here."_

_And he asked him, and all the other leaders of his army, for a feast- and joyless evening meal._


End file.
